[ale] OT: offline malware removal tool for windoze

[Jay Loden]

Anti-Vir does, but they've gone and added annoying nagware into the product (think occasional screen-wide 'please purchase' windows) so I've since stopped recommending them. AVG works decently, and I've also heard a lot of good things about BitDefender. They now offer a free version of their software for Windows, with all the usual features: http://www.bitdefender.com/PRODUCT-14-en--BitDefender-8-Free-Edition.html

I will also take a moment to plug my own removal tool, AIMFix - http://jayloden.com/AIMFix.exe ;-) It's focused on IM worms but it removes several thousand different pieces of malware so it's worth running in general since running time is just a few seconds. 

Other than that, I'll second a recommendation for HijackThis - but the catch is it's only if you know what you're looking for. I've read thousands of HijackThis logs in doing antivirus work, so I can spot the 'wrong' entries very quickly, but they love to hide them with duplicated system file names, obscure startup entries, windows service entries, etc. 

I highly recommend posting the HijackThis log to a forum such as http://subratam.org where they can help diagnose malware issues for you based on the log entries. You're also welcome to post it on the list (or if you prefer you can send it to me off-list) and I can take a look and update AIMFix to remove items if you'd like.

HTH,

-Jay

Warren Myers wrote:
> I think anti-vir does on-access, too... but i'm not positive.
> 
> WMM
> 
> On 8/13/07, *Brian Pitts* <brian at polibyte.com
> <mailto:brian at polibyte.com>> wrote:
> 
>     Robert Reese wrote:
>     > Obviously, a lesson in computing safety plus a couple of free
>     Comodo products http://www.comodo.com will help the teacher
>     tremendously.
> 
>     Interesting stuff. AVG was the only free Windows antivirus I knew of
>     with on-access scanning until now.